Review

My favorite season growing up has easily been autumn. A time when the summer heat dies down, the leaves change, and it becomes nice again to sit in a park for a while to just... think. The birdcalls and sounds of leaves flowing with the wind across the landscape provides a good backdrop for me to think back on what led my life to this moment. It's often in times like this where I get wistful about the past I had, yet simultaneously solemn about the past I wish I had. For example, back a few years ago I found myself reflecting on the innocent moments I had growing up, the fun times I had running around the backyard... but also on how I deeply wished I had a chance to do it with a friend.

I bring this up because Things We Lost in the Fire brings about that exact same kind of sentimental melancholy within me. It's Low operating in a much warmer mode than their prior record, with the band now feeling unafraid to add brass, strings, and keyboards to almost every song on this record. It gives it a very... home-y vibe, for lack of a better term. The opening track, "Sunflower", is a good example right out of the gate. The moment the bridge hits, and the strings guide you into a final chorus where a banjo lies in wait to support the sound... It makes my mind conjure images of the sun finally rising over a gloomy locale after so much time spent in the dark. It's a moment when you feel like you can breathe once again, even though you know there's still an undercurrent of sorrow lying just beneath.

The other comparatively upbeat tracks like "Dinosaur Act" and "July" give the same feelings in different ways, with the latter being a solemn reversal where as the second chorus ends, clouds cover the sun and drain hope away. It's astonishingly well executed, and followed by a tear-inducing outro.

Mimi Parker is also given a lot more time to shine on this record in tracks like "Laser Beam" and "Embrace", tracks detailing her experiences with alcoholic parents and childbirth respectively. The former is sonically a return to the sparseness of Low's first few records, while the latter slowly pounds until reaching the apex of its crescendo in the third verse. "I fell down the stairs, I wished I were dead..." It's profoundly chilling.

The song I'd say embodies the kind of "sentimental melancholy" I speak of the most would have to be "Whore". I really find it hard to explain, but it's something about the key the song is in, the way Mimi sings "you will get your reward" throughout the song, the way that all the instruments slowly get added to the mix, all of it...! It all mixes together to somehow get me reduced to a sobbing mess. It is indescribably beautiful, and by far one of the best things the band has ever done.

Eventually, everything culminates with another pure expression of the concept: "In Metal". A song about wanting those profoundly precious moments, like the raising of a child, to stay as they are so that you never lose it. It's a wish ignored by the passage of time, as well... we all grow up. But even still, we hold a lot of precious moments dear to us. Sometimes we look back on them fondly. Other times we wish that there were opportunities to form more. That retrospection is what this album is for.

-- Ellie Hedge, 2026.2.2